Down the 3D rabbit hole

If there’s anyone who deserves a crack at rendering Alice in Wonderland in digital 3D, it’s Tim Burton. He’s always had the dark spirit to locate the nooks and crannies embedded in Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s tale, a story that’s laced with so much naughty mischief the original book would probably get banned in this day and age.

Sure, Burton’s destroyed other adaptations in the past (Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes come to mind). But this re-imagined Alice is all about the eye candy.

Slip on the 3D goggles — as my daughter and I did last Thursday at EDSA Shangri-La Digital Cinema, where something called “XpanD active 3D glasses” were handed out— and disappear down the rabbit hole of enhanced CGI graphics and immersive anaglyph experience.

But that comes a little later. First we get the usual Burton back story: see Alice at age seven, precocious and full of wild ideas; then Alice at age 19, about to become betrothed to a proper git at a garden party, and running off to chase a waistcoated rabbit down a hole in the ground.

It’s interesting that a different aesthetic now dictates moviemaking in the new 3D age: care is taken not to give away too many visual fireworks in the opening scenes. As in Avatar, where there’s about 20 minutes of dull exposition while the soldiers and scientists prowl around before jacking into the faraway planet, in Alice, everything is subtly rendered in 3D from the opening frame, but it’s the kind of flat, cutout 3D some of us may recall from ViewMaster Reels. It’s only after Alice descends into a room with a key, a curious bottle marked “DRINK ME” and a small cake marked “EAT ME” that things start to get truly hallucinogenic.

Good thing. Alice (played by Mia Wasikowska) follows the path of her previous seven-year-old self’s adventures, trekking through Burtonian mists and gnarled trees only to find herself in an alternate reality called Underland, a doppelganger for Wonderland. She runs into a blue caterpillar smoking a hookah (mouthed by Alan Rickman) who’s no help whatsoever. She bumps into Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum (who only actually appear in Carroll’s sequel, Through the Looking Glass, and the 1951 Disney cartoon version). She has a tea party with the March Hare and a curiously candy-colored Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. It’s all very hard to describe when you’re straight.

Depp’s performance is bizarre, but not off-the-charts bizarre like his Willy Wonka; just the right amount of bizarre. He does have a tendency to lapse into a Scottish accent at odd moments. Burton has explained the Hatter’s wild orange hair is a reference to the mercury poisoning experienced by actual hatters who used mercury to cure felt back in Victorian days; this supposedly adds to the depth of Depp’s performance. Now that’s bizarre.

But for my money, the party only starts when Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen shows up. With a head amusingly inflated three times normal by CGI, and a voice that seems to be a conscious takeoff on Miranda Richardson’s Queen Elizabeth I from the old Rowan Atkinson Black Adder II series (the Red Queen, in her first appearance, demands “a dwink”), she steals every frame her hydrocephalic noggin appears in. But that’s just me.

There is something wonderfully compelling about the 3D design and framing of many shots in Alice in Wonderland. The Queen’s Red Palace and forests gain extraordinary depth and detail, almost like staring into one of those Stereogram images from the ‘90s. A little too immersive, maybe. The movie’s crammed with visual gags — some familiar, like Alice playing croquet with a flamingo, and others new, like the domino-card collapse of the Red Queen’s soldiers.

But beyond all this tricky design, there’s a great deal of Tim Burton’s usual psychosexual blitzkrieg. Of course, a lot of that sexual subtext is right there in Carroll’s original tale — from the Freudian presence of holes to the cries of “Off with his head!” — and it could be argued that, for once, Burton is not pulling rabbits out of hats.

The script by Linda Wolveerton seeks to look at Alice through a Victorian prism, having her grow from a willfully imaginative child to a young woman, ready to assert her own values in an adult world. Or something like that. Basically, she grows the balls to turn down a marriage proposal by the aforementioned git at the garden party.

Burton has his own peculiar vision, one that works only so far as you enjoy his 21st-century Oprahizing of beloved characters from literature: “It was always a girl wandering around from one crazy character to another (in earlier versions), and I never really felt any real emotional connection,” Burton explains on Wikipedia. Here he tried for “some framework of emotional grounding” for Alice. He tried something similar with Sleepy Hollow, oh-so-loosely based on Washington Irving’s tale; in his abysmal rethink of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; and his remake of Sweeney Todd, which had a wee too much psychology toward the end, and not enough throat-cutting. Basically, ever since Edward Scissorhands, Burton has had a tendency to try to “explain” his weirdo characters too much in flashbacks. Believe me, his Alice in Wonderland triggers enough flashbacks as it is.

Back to the story. Because there’s a Red Queen, the script calls for a White Queen (Anne Hathaway), so the two can do battle on a large chessboard and Alice can fulfill her destiny of… slaying the Jabberwocky, a nasty dragon that appeared in a poem contained in Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. There’s also a snaky Crispin Glover as Stain, the Red Queen’s seven-foot-tall henchman, to do her evil bidding. None of this storyline will sound familiar to those who have read the books. And this is where the movie kind of goes off its own goofy, dark-hearted rails. It starts to resemble so many other CGI “good vs. evil” battle scenes that even my seven-year-daughter asked me: “Do you think Alice in Wonderland was influenced by Narnia?” She pointed out the similarities: kids disappearing into an alternate world, place is run by evil queen, good guy/gal shows up to set things right. Smart kid. I said maybe this movie was influenced by the movie version of the classic C.S. Lewis books, but the books focus less on obligatory battle scenes and CGI sorcery and more on character and plot. She seemed unconvinced.

For my part, I was more or less enjoying the 3D experience and asking myself a nagging question: Will there ever be a time when 3D movies offer audiences more adult fare — not necessarily porn, but intelligent scripts for grownup people, instead of the raft of kiddie flicks that get previewed every time we plop on our glasses nowadays? I mean, couldn’t something like 2001 or Lawrence of Arabia benefit from a 3D revisit, or does the technology, by necessity, short-circuit any and all deep thought?

Perhaps it’s too late to ask that question, especially after the success of Avatar: the rabbit hole of 3D technology is already gawping wide open. It’s comin’ at ya. At the very least, we are left to paraphrase the sarcastic cry of Russell Crowe in Gladiator: “Are you not entertained? In 3D?”

Oh, yeah. You betcha.